I like that one especially; it really gets to the heart of the matter.
I can just see the advertising copy:
Wal*Mart's own Budget PCs! Now with 500MHz Celeron processors, 16 megs of RAM, 2.1 gigs of hard disk space. Bill Gates is a Jerk 1.2 comes preinstalled.
In other news, Ford has recently demanded that Microsoft stop using the name "Explorer", as in Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer. Ford cites the 1990 introduction of the Explorer as evidence that they had the name first.
The many reliability and safety problems with Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer cause confusion among Ford Explorer customers who are themselves accustomed to these traits, a Ford spokesman said Friday.
FUCK YOU! The Tragically Hip are a great band. And Canadian music is better than American music. Just have a listen to latest Matthew Good CD, it is much better than anything on your top 40 list.
*MY* Top-40 list? Well, for one thing, I am Canadian. And *my* Top-40 list is reads along the lines of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, CCR, Dire Straits, ZZ Top, etc. You might or might not get the picture by now.
To illustrate the folly of your argument that Canadian music is great, I submit to you the very thing you're arguing as proof of the abomination of radio stations "forcing" American music on us:
The reason for content laws is because American music music (Which is complete SHIT) is forced down on us. Even With these laws, the radio stations manage to force the American popculture down on us. This is an abomination. The real artist get little attention will while your fucking britteny beers is played over and over again. If anything, we should ban American music.
All righty, then.
Fact 1: Radio stations make money by selling advertising time.
Fact 2: Advertisers pay more money to run their ads when more people listen to a given radio station.
Fact 3: Increasing a radio station's listenership increases their profits.
Fact 4: To increase the listenership, the radio station has to play what people want to hear.
Summary of Facts 1-4: The radio station will make more money if it plays what people want to hear.
Therefore, if Canadian music is so great, listeners would want to hear it, and radio stations would play it on their own. No Canadian content laws would be required.
The fact that most radio stations play *exactly* their Canadian content requirements, many of them filling their 40% requirement during non-peak hours and playing their good stuff at drivetime (peak hours), should serve to illustrate the fact that Canadians don't especially care for Canadian music.
The one notable exception to this - the one national broadcaster who actually exceeds (massively or otherwise) the Canadian content requirements is the CBC. Nicknamed "The Corpse" in the broadcasting business, their ratings are tiny and their demographics are primarily shut-ins, 74-year-old women who would change the station but lost the owner's manual for the new-fangled radio they bought in the 1970s, and the 0.5% of 1% who actually think that Jean Poutine had been doing a good job as Prime Minister.
The fact that the average American can't appreciate music that is a little bit more sophisticated is another matter.
A recent Arbitron (radio station ratings) study in Toronto showed something very interesting.
Second, superheterodyne radio receivers (which is just about every radio receiver made since the 1930s) leaks an RF signal mathematically related to the station to which the radio is tuned.
Radio station ratings services like Arbitron use the above facts to calculate drivetime ratings for a given radio station very easily. Point some special equipment at a freeway, count the number of car radios leaking a local oscillator signal which would indicate the radio is tuned to that station, and compare that to the total number of cars going by tuned to other stations.
Arbitron found that, on one day in Toronto, close to 50% of radios were tuned to Buffalo NY radio stations. Granted, of course, Arbitron studies presuppose that your station's listeners will be employed (which is good, because you don't care to try to advertise to people who have no money) and who drive (again, good, because few reasonable people will take the bus to work if they don't have to).
Apparently, even in Canada's biggest market, Canadians aren't any more sophisticated than Americans.
The whole thing broke down because the American side wasn't doing a roughly equivalent collection that Canadian artists could share in.
Canadian music released in the USA is done so by the RIAA and royalties are covered by ?ASCAP?. Therefore, an American levy would compensate Canadian artists for music released to the American market. I do not believe that the converse is true; I think SOCAN only covers Canadian artists, not American artists releasing in Canada.
So, for Canadian-only music residing on American hard disk drives, we can make a couple of simple assumptions.
To use shared files on American broadband services as a barometer of the numbers, Royalties ($R) "owing" are proportional to number (n) of Rita McNeil albums available for download off RoadRunner, Adelphia, Comcast, etc. users.
Therefore, $R = mu * n, where mu is some constant of proportionality to be determined by bored politicians who could be solving the world's problems instead of pandering to a bunch of self important idiots who don't seem to understand that their music sucks.
Over here in Mexico there's a tax on CD's that goes to Music distributors to compensate for CD piracy.
Yeah, it's the same in Canada.
But the funny thing is that we're being forced to pay for piracy of music that no intelligent human being would tolerate in an elevator, let alone pay for.
The tax levied on Canadians goes exclusively to Canadian artists to pay for all the copies of Tragically Hip's Bobcaygeon and Rita McNeil's Now The Bells Ring allegedly floating around on Kazaa Lite.
Of course, that's bullshit; Canadians with MP3 collections have stashes of the stuff that gets little airplay here because of the 40% Canadian Content laws. And those Canadian artists who have actual talent have generally fled to greener pastures south of the border... think of Rush, Celine Dion, Barenaked Ladies.
If they really wanted to help out those being hurt by people with large MP3 collections, send the money south of the border! (But, of course, that will never happen. Some Liberal-appointed 85-year-old Supreme Court justice *knows* that good Canadian kids are only listening to all that top-flight good Canadian music that has to be forced onto listeners with Canadian Content laws!)
If it's anything like that in Mexico, you must be as frustrated as I am. I'm paying a tax - for music that I couldn't be paid to listen to - to burn Knoppix demo CDs for friends.
I'm *so* proud of the protectionist pandering-to-special-interest-groups stupidity of my country.
I read in another one of your postings that you work for a defense contractor. I did too, worked for Litton until we were bought out by Northrop-Grumman and let the layoffs fly... I've also been stuck arranging the amusements for the office Christmas party.
You got volunteered, huh? That sucks. Listen, this might sound like an easy/stupid job but you'd better put at least a little thought into making sure you don't screw up. I like to think I'm a fun-lovin' and sometime outrageous guy but I hold myself in check at office parties. You never know when you're going to do something that will give your co-workers a bad impression of you that will last for years.
Completely! You have to be very careful at the office Christmas party. It's one thing if you're just a party-goer; you can hang around with your friends, but be careful to mingle. On the other hand, if you're arranging the entertainment, you have to mingle to make sure everyone is having a good time. And you have to be the life of the party, but still maintain dignity and respect. Avoid the alcohol.
You haven't told us anything about the type of people who are working at this company except that it's a mix of geeks and non-geeks. If I were you, I'd play it safe and try to find out what games were played at previous holiday parties. Whatever you do make the games very non-threatening. No Twister or crap like that. Even if you think your co-workers would be cool with that, you never know when one of the prudish spouses of an employee will object and sour the party (or cause the couple to get into an arguement).
Twister has to be just about the most sexually-charged game on the face of the earth.
What I did for the office Christmas party:
No dishwasher in the kitchen at work, so I brought the racks from my dishwasher to work that day. Dirty dishes were simply tossed into the racks, brought home, cleaned, returned the next day.
Took over two offices (including my own) which were adjacent to the kitchen.
Office 1 - mine - 25x20 foot corner office with nice windows. Games room - all traditional bar-type games, which are not sexually threatening and become more challenging with more alcohol. Borrowed a cheap pool table from a co-worker, placed it in my office. Borrowed the video projector from the conference room and aimed it at a wall, installed MAME on a computer and let people play - do NOT use an X-Box or anything else, that's not inclusive enough. You want old-school video games that anyone can play, nothing complicated where you have to learn what the 18 buttons on the game pad are for. Stuck a dart board into the middle of the big cork-board on one of my walls.
Office 2 - I used to work in professional sound and lighting, so I brought in some of my stuff - PA system, fog machine, lights. Glued a mirror onto a pulley on the end of a motor shaft, pointed a laser pointer into it and had it trace out a pretty red circle. Cleared the middle of the room for a dance floor.
Music: critically important choices here. If you have 10 fifty-year-olds for each 25-year-old, then the ratio of older music to new should be 10:1. I had everything from Chubby Checker's Twist to Sneaker Pimps' Spin Spin Sugar. Make the ratio of new to old songs similar to the ratio of young to old people. Disco is always good, because most people like it, even if they won't admit it. Remember to intersperse some ballads for slow dances. Collect the MP3s and throw together a playlist (shuffle!), because you simply won't have the time to be DJ.
Try to incorporate the company's products in a new and interesting way. One of the things I designed was a radar video isolator and splitter system. It works from DC to 10MHz, enough to carry NTSC video (nothing really above 4MHz). I hooked up one of the prototypes between the NTSC video output on the games computer and the video input jacks on a couple of TV sets we had around. The boss and everyone else who had worked on it had a new application to talk about.
The more T-Shirts you buy, the less often you need to do laundry.
Yeah, but need more socks and jeans, too. Boxer shorts not so critical - going commando in a pair of line-dried jeans feels *so* good.
Don't fall for this! I now can't do all of my laundry, because I have no place to store my last dozen t-shirts. They are sitting on a chair right now. I started buying more clothes without looking at the volume of my dirty laundry. Now where do I store this stuff? Anyone want a t-shirt?
Sure! You can send me your cool t-shirt donations. I like to work on cars, so I go through t-shirts, but I would especially like offensive, amusing, or technology t-shirts. (My favorites? "Fellatio is not an opera.", saw it when I was walking past a store in Toronto's gay village and decided that I had to have it. Also have a black Maytag golf shirt which I love.)
Why do I like the Maytag shirt so much? Well, years ago, I had a GE washing machine (it was a Hotpoint brand, GE made washers for dozens of other companies). The design of this washing machine was stupid - the tub is stationary, and in an unbalanced spin, the basket moves relative to the tub. At the bottom of the tub, there was a massive rubber seal between the tub and the top of the transmission. And that rubber seal was strangely dissolving into the wash water.
So, about 10 years ago, I scored a 1954 Maytag washer out of the garbage. Took a look and discovered that it needed belts. (Maytag washers *must* use Maytag belts; they did away with a complicated and unreliable clutch mechanism by simply designing the belt to slip as the washer comes up to speed in the spin cycle. Regular belts don't slip enough, so the washer will make nasty noises and might burn out its motor.) Spend $20 on a set of Maytag belts, and the thing has been running perfectly ever since. Washing dirty underwear for 49 years now with nothing more than two new belts - love it. No stupid rubber tub seal to dissolve and stain your clothes, no tub-basket contact in an unbalanced load to chip the basket and make it abrasive to clothing. Bulletproof design, almost all Maytags from 1940s to modern coin-op laundromat washers use this same mechanism. My clothes last almost forever, and I've grown so fond of my 1954 Maytag washer that I actually look forward to doing laundry.
In 2000, my 1967 Maytag dryer (also scored at about the same time, every bit as tough as the washer) got choked up with lint when the vent hose fell off the back. I pulled it apart to clean it and decided to change the felt drum seals at the same time. When I was at the appliance store buying the seals, I was chatting with the counter guy, and he asked me about my washer. He called over the sales manager and they asked me if they could borrow my washing machine to put in the showroom for the holiday rush ("Maytag Dependability" was the sign over my washer). I agreed, and they sent over a truck with a brand-new Maytag Neptune for me to use while mine was on display. And a Maytag golf shirt.
Anyway, to organize my clothes, I bought a $15 wooden shelving unit. I simply fold them and place them on that - for some reason, I don't use drawers. This has been a cheap and easy solution, reducing the former problem of a chair buried in cotton.
They still use blackboards? Here in NL, Canada they are considers a health hazord and have been replaced by white boards in all the schools and collages.
This is in Ottawa, Canada, at Carleton University. Yup, still using blackboards, installed last year in the brand-new Azrieli Theater.
I don't think the fumes from some of the cleaners and markers are much better for you than chauk dust.
I would think so. It's probably some idiot with an arts degree who read in The National Enquirer that chalk dust might cause coughing, so without considering the whole system implications (ie. whiteboard chemicals), petitioned the school for the health effects. Universities are more apt to be "politically correct" and "environmentally correct" than rational, so they probably caved.
Personally, I would have sat the complainant down in my office, where there would be a chalk board, a white board, and a video projector.
I would invite the complainant to sniff the chalk dust, then the whiteboard markers and cleaners, then lick the lead solder on one of the video projector's PC boards. Before the Pb2+ ions could reach the complainant's intercranial fluids, I would then ask the complainant which one he or she now felt was more environmentally friendly and less apt to cause health problems.
If the complainant continued to prefer that blackboards were removed, then I would have the complainant removed from the campus for "lacking the basic common sense and reasoning abilities which we must expect of university students". At the very least, I would provide the complainant with a DeVilbiss respirator with dust cartridges, and one of those old Radio Shack toy firefighters helmets with the revolving light, both of which said complainant was going to wear as a condition of his or her presence on campus. (After all, we have to simultaneously protect this student from accidentally banging his or her cranium on things, and alert faculty and fellow students that this individual is delicate.)
Hopefully they will all be replaced by LCD projectors and the instructors will make all the notes aviable on the lan.
No. For many parts of the lecture, yes, this would be a good thing. But there are lots of cases where the chalkboard is useful - in particular, answering a student's question by working out the problem on the board. The actual act of writing notes on the blackboard also forces the instructor to interact with the material. In my university experience, many PhDs really shouldn't have been teaching at all (a gifted researcher, for example, isn't necessarily an even reasonable teacher), and the best instructors were those who didn't have the "Doctor" title. Actually interacting with the material at a blackboard might be helping a PhD who hasn't solved a differential equation in 20 years remember how to do it so he can properly answer a question. I think the potential for embarrassment would also make them spend time reviewing the material before presenting it to the class.
I will use my psychic mind reading powers to say that you must be atleast 35.
Heheh... Nope, but I'm old beyond my years.
How come every generation of old people feels the need to criticize every new technology that comes around by mis-characterizing it?
Actually, I love technology; my career choices undoubtedly reflect that.
If you put yourself in a situation where you're "on an electronic leash", then that's your fault. Do you realize that you don't have to answer a cell phone whenever it rings? It's pretty nifty technology, you have to press a button to answer it.
I know. But the reality is that when the phone rings, you feel obliged to answer it. Then, pretty soon, it's a nuisance and makes you feel guilty.
Of course, you can turn off the ringer. Then, the problem becomes, "Huh-NEEEEEEE... Why didn't you answer the phone when I called? What were you doing?"
People become accustomed to being able to reach you and talk to you about every stupid little thing that happens in their lives.
For the very same reason I eschew land-line telephones or ICQ and other messaging systems, and like e-mail: It's a constant interruption. With e-mail, on the other hand, the sender can send the message when it's convenient for them. I can then read it and reply when it's convenient for me. Telephones, in particular cellphones, require it to be convenient for both parties to talk at the same time.
If you say that the advantages of having a cell phone aren't worth it for you, that's fine. But the only real disadvantage is how much it costs and having to carry it in your pocket. The whole leash thing simply tells me something about your relationship with the would-be leash-holder.
Okay. Try this. Turn off your cellphone for a week. Tell me what you get from your friends. "I tried to call you, but you didn't answer." Endlessly. You've built up the expectation that you will be available to discuss all sorts of stupid things, including the weather, any time they're feeling bored in the lineup at the grocery store.
My friends know how I feel about cellphones, and telephones in general. We communicate by e-mail. We arrange to get together to drink beer by e-mail.
I imagine some older folks didn't like the telephone when it came out - I refuse to be on a leash when I'm at home, forced to be accountable to someone - somewhere.
For sure. But there's still the escape with a regular telephone. If you don't answer your land line, they assume that you're out. If you don't answer your cellphone - which, by tradition, is always with you - then they assume that you're ignoring them.
Get there and this thing is a beast. The printer frame was cast aluminum about the same size and strength as the intake manifold and heads on a Chevy V8 engine. The computer itself was made of 1" steel square tubing that was like a quarter inch thick, the bolts that held it together looked like something you would use on a house. The hard drive was a single platter, and the base housing was cast bronze or something, weighed about 20 - 25 lbs or so, about the size of a current ATX desktop case, and the motor for the drive was a monster 220V electric motor about the size of a small pumpkin - half horsepower maybe?
It's really a shame that you had to trash that machine, it sounds really nice.
Texas Instruments used to build computers like that, even for domestic use. Remember the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A? The $99 console that you could buy a K-Mart? They were built like tanks, too.
Most impressive was the TI-99/4A PES (Peripheral Expansion System). It was a big steel box housing a power supply, a backplane, and a Shugart 5.25" single-side single-density disk drive - 90K per floppy!
TI made a fundamental mistake in their assumptions about computer-buying consumers. They assumed that consumers were idiots who weren't interested in doing more than playing games, writing BASIC programs, and balancing the checkbook. Consequently, TI didn't release the Assembly programming kit ("Editor/Assembler") until almost too late, and tried to keep all the details of the very weird, very minicomputerish hardware secret.
Part of the assumption was that, if Joe Consumer installs hardware, he's going to do it wrong. So they made it impossible to install the hardware wrong. All the accessory cards for the PES included on-board ROM chips with drivers; the machine had true plug-and-play capabilities. And because Joe Consumer is apt to try to put a square peg into a round hole, they made it impossible to install the cards incorrectly without using power tools.
What? Wouldn't blocking the cell phone signal only prevent the person from sending the picture off? The photograph could still be taken and simply sent later, once the cell phone is away from the jamming signal, right?
This is true. But I don't think that's the primary application of cellphone jammers.
Yeah, well, Beethoven's Fifth, being played through a crappy 2" piezoelectric disk speaker as the ringtone on some Nokia in a movie theater. That's the best reason for jamming that I can come up with. (Why custom ring tones? Don't people know those things sound as stupid as coffee can mufflers on Honda Civics?)
I have had cellphones with work, and was glad to get rid of them when I did. I have no interest in being on an electronic leash, forced to be accountable to someone - somewhere. Or standing in the line-up at Wal*Mart, the ring and promptly following, "Hey, it's me. Whatcha doing? Wanna come over?" (Who is "me"? If I slept with this person, it must not have been very memorable.)
In short, I *hate* cellphones.
Quoting from article: including universities which use the technology to stop students from diddling away on phones during lectures.
Hey, if the student diddles quietly, it's his funeral when his GPA drops and he gets kicked out of school.
Cellphones with integrated digital cameras might have their place, though. I know a university student whose math professor puts excellent and comprehensive notes on the blackboard. So he started to bring a digital camera and a small tripod to class, and takes pictures of each blackboard full of material. He sent me a sample a while ago. An integrated camera/phone would never run out of available internal memory. Personally, copying the notes down would help me remember the material, but whatever works for him... there's a certain style of practical problem solving skill at work there: he's a second-year engineering student; I think I'll have to hire him when he's done.:)
However (and maybe this is because the Vorbis files emphasize the high frequencies; I'm not sure) the MP3s sound "flat", somehow.
My understanding of the sound quality difference between MP3 and Ogg Vorbis is that MP3 uses a full Fourier transform (sine, cosine and constant) on the audio, while Ogg Vorbis uses wavelets and does a cosine transform only.
Discontinuities between blocks sent to the sine transform would cause the Gibbs effect; these would be heard as a garbled low-amplitude reverberation of the high frequency components and transients in the audio. This is consistent with the effects of low bitrate compression; at higher bitrates, there would presumably be more terms used in both the sine and cosine transforms, so the amplitude of the compression artifacts would become smaller and therefore inaudible.
Cosine transforms, on the other hand, don't have problems with discontinuities, so there'd be an immediate increase in sound quality, at a given bitrate. Transients (attack on cymbals or the rattle of the chain across the membrane of a snare drum, for example) would be handled by wavelet functions - there's probably some sort of mechanism in the code which sees the sharp attack or decay as fast risetimes or falltimes, ignores processing it by cosine transform, and uses wavelets instead.
But I don't know for sure. For one thing, I am *not* a programmer. I can make "Hello, World" and compile my own kernel, but you really don't want me poring over the source for libvorbis.
First, the sample encoder is MUCH easier to use than what I've already been using (GRip). I don't know if that's because my current method is so terrible or because the new one is so great.
I like to use crip to make backups of my CDs to Ogg Vorbis. (Backup isn't really the term, it's just so much easier to play my CDs when I don't have to physically put them into the drive!)
crip has minimal dependencies, and runs quite happily on a machine without X.
Second, the resulting files were about 10% smaller.
For a given sound quality, yeah. A -q 4 Vorbis file is about comparable to a 128kbps MP3 in size, but absolutely better in sound quality. After 192kbps in MP3, I can't reliably tell it from a CD. My compromise is to use -q 5, which yields the same filesize as a 160kbps MP3, which I cannot tell from a CD.
Third, the sound quality was "equivalent". That is, I couldn't tell the difference, BUT I'm not an expert and my sound equipment is FAR from top of the line (just some computer speakers plugged into an AWE32).
I'm a former professional sound tech. I use a Sound A-5000 amplifier and a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4x speakers plugged into a modified (new op-amps, loads of shielding, separate linear DC supply to the analog stages) ISA SoundBlaster 16. I cannot tell an Ogg Vorbis file at -q 5 apart from the original (CD-quality) WAV file, or from a good ($900 when new) NAD CD player connected to my sound system.
Be careful compiling the Ogg encoder - specifically libvorbis - on older distros with the flaky Red Hat compiler. You'll get nasty artifacts in your audio.
Well, desktop, actually. As for murderer, the culprit would be the HP-35, not my T.I. SR-40. T.I. wishes they were the first.
I know, I know. I wasn't being brand-specific. Pickett was still in business until at least 2000 (selling drafting rulers, etc.). And it wasn't the TI which killed the sliderule, just the scientific calculator in general.
I need to get a battery and chager for my 35 one of these days.
Good luck. I've never had an HP-35; if the battery is pretty easy (in shape and voltage), then you should be able to build a charger for it pretty easily. But, if I were you, I'd be looking for the original, for the same reason that I just spent $300 putting new bearings, gaskets and belts into my 1954 Maytag washing machine (well, not just that it's pretty, but I don't think $300 - or even $1000 - would buy me a new washer that would clean my dirty underwear for 49 years and need nothing more than 2 belts).
I also do need to get a better slide rule. The Pickett is just fine, but after all, it IS just a Microline.
The official slide rule of the Apollo Space Program was the Pickett N600-MES, which were standard equipment on all Apollo missions. Yup, a Microline has been on the moon. Several of 'em, presumably one for each lunar landing.
Big sliderules aren't necessarily such a great thing, for the same reason as I'm not a big fan of calculators or CAD: Fewer significant figures forces you to round up or down during calculations - up on forces, down on material strength. It's interesting how Maytag stopped building washers like mine when CAD and the computer-driven practicality of finite element analysis allowed them to optimize the design to within an inch of its life.
Thanks for the tip about LyME! That's a new one to me.
I was at a local dinner with my vegiterian girl friend at the time and I ended up ordering a hamburger while she got a grilled cheese sandwich. I then had to sit through a 10 minute lecture on how meat is processed and killed and that I was a horrible person for eating meat.
That reminds me of the Family Guy episode where the Grim Reaper went out for coffee with the girl from the pet shop and ended up listening to her:
"You know why I like animals? They don't have wars. War is a human invention."
"What are you talking about? Animals fight all the time!"
"Not with nuclear arms! You can't hug your children with nuclear arms!"
Solves the problem, then turns to waitress: "Check, please!"
I hope, at the very least, you dumped her after that clear display that your offspring wouldn't benefit intellectually from having their mother's defective genes.
I said: "You will put out meat pizzas, right? I am a carnivore and I believe it is unethical to kill and eat defenseless little plants which are rooted in the ground and are unable to put up any fight at all against human harvestors. Animals at least have a chance to escape or mount a defense."
That was beautiful!
There's a recent school of thought that some plants emit chemicals when injured; these chemicals serve as signals to other plants. I think it was a species of evergreen - pine or something. If the plant senses injury, isn't that pain?
One way or another, it sucks being a part of the food chain. However, it's stupid to pretend that we're not omnivorous - there's a reason we have incisors! So I like to fsck with them.
I still have my PETA t-shirt from school days. "PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals". Used to have the pop-culturally correct vegan types screaming and yelling at me in the hallways, calling me a murderer.
but without scripts and a mathematics keypad, it is nothing compared to my 83+, let alone my 89.
Another reply to your post mentioned it; I'll add my two cents: I run LyME on my Palm IIIxe.
I love it. For most stuff, it's perfectly adequate, and it's really great having much of Matlab in your back pocket with everything else that a well-used PDA carries.
I use my little old Palm for everything. Replying to e-mail (Eudora for Palm) on the PDA during downtime somewhere requires a keyboard. As such, I have it available for LyME, and generally whip it out anywhere I need more computing power than my Casio FX-991MS or TI-30XIIB. (Tangent: The Casio has *much* more features than the TI, but the TI feels more like the engineers who designed it actually use it.)
Anyway, there are two flaws I've found with LyME in my daily use, and I'm picky. Big calculations will appear to crash the Palm, but control is eventually returned (unless your function or script is faulty). More pressingly, however, I'm probably missing how to put axis on plots. axis doesn't appear to do it, and it's really hard to look at a graph where the x and y values aren't labelled!
Sometimes it feels slow. But that's the trade-off I make for having an old Palm - long battery life, and I'm not out $300+ if something happens to it.
Otherwise, I love it. Vectorizing data and using your own functions against it makes data entry dead easy in the field even using Graffiti; I can be done a calculation while someone else is still digging a notebook computer out of a briefcase.
Ah, the murderer and its victim, reunited in your desk drawer.
I do my handheld crunching with an assortment:
Pickett N3T, retrofitted with a magnifying cursor off one of the xx-MES series (because my arm is getting shorter)
Ecobra 1461 for trig in degrees
Texas Instruments TI-30XII for routine stuff (love the keyboard, display, and one-touch variables)
Casio FX-991MS for matrices and systems of equations with too much nasty stuff to do by hand, vector features come in handy when I'm too tired to take a cross product (though why they didn't allow you to enter vectors in cartesian form using the brackets and comma key is beyond me - don't think any of Casio's engineers use the thing, they just designed it to do what the marketing department told them it should do)
Palm IIIxe with LyME - Matlab in your pocket! Need the external keyboard so that you don't go crazy trying to write a function in Graffiti
It's called The Library. Not only are there desks there, but you don't have to block out the ambient noise of three idling computers in an enclosed concrete 10' by 8' space.
Meant to do this for a while, but never got around to it.
I have a great old 1950s Quik-Frez fridge which I updated a long time ago with a new (R-134) Amana compressor, new insulation, homebuilt electronic thermostat, little bit of Bondo to fill the dents, and a fresh coat of paint. Looks brand new, works even better.
The problem is, as much as I love it, I can never get around to defrosting it (no way to easily add defrost heaters to the ice box). And it's a little small for food and stuff.
The sound of my computers drives me insane, but I'm not going to go to the silent PC trouble, or water cooling, etc. So what I've been meaning to do is put a small hole for wires in the bottom of the fridge and install the computers inside it. With the door closed, it would be silent (I stuck a power supply connected to a pair of old Seagate ST-225 5.25" hard disks inside to try). The thermostat could be set to keep the interior about 50F, or turned off altogether if the interior temperature doesn't get out of hand.
The only real problem is the accessibilty of the backs of the machines for cables and stuff.
It's not an issue right now, though. Most of my computers now live in a laundry/furnace room on the other side of a wall from my monitor and keyboard, so hopefully this will give someone an idea of what to do with a cool old fridge.
My father, an electrical engineer, was surprised when I showed him my electrician's reference book containing formulas for things like load balancing. He thought, for big jobs, electricians worked off pre-made plans drawn up by someone "educated" who did the calculations for them.
Heheh... must have blown him away to learn that you can do almost all AC circuit analysis without having to take the square root of a negative number even once... and still have the circuit work!
I imagine many PhDs think carpenters don't know anything about structural engineering, or that auto mechanics are totally ignorant of mechanical engineering. Ivory-tower arrogance can sometimes work just like thick-headed stupidity.
I agree completely. Some of the engineers I've worked with have had the same mentality. One in particular, a very recent top-of-his-class graduate from a respectable mechanical engineering school, had a particular need to try to spoon-feed a machine shop full of guys who'd already had a decade of experience before he was born.
While the guy I'm thinking about is a particularly stellar example, to a lesser extent, I know lots of people from university whose career choices were made because, "Well, the guidance counsellor said that I was good at math and physics, so I should do engineering".
These are people who never played with Lego, and didn't ask for tools for Chrismakkah. To me, that's a more important engineering prerequisite than calculus, since calculus can be learned; mechanical/electrical/etc aptitude simply cannot.
Engineering is a tough course. I know first-hand. But it doesn't make you more intelligent, or more creative - education cannot do that (if anything, education seems to stifle creativity - look at PhDs). All it does is teach you a lot of stuff, show you a new way of thinking about problems, and work you nearly to death.
Lots of the smartest guys I've known are the blue-collar guys who build, install and service the stuff I design. We hang around together, drinking beer, shooting the shit, and working on each others' vehicles. I like hanging around on the floor, working alongside them, learning from their experience, and I like when they hang around in my office, looking over my shoulder and trying to understand a pile of math or seeing OrCAD on my monitor. The janitor hated all the oily bootprints on my carpet, so I picked up a runner.
I expect them to tell me when they think a design or procedure can be improved. They help me make a product more reliable, more durable, cheaper to assemble or easier to fix.
For the most part, a good (wo)man with relevent skills (electrician or technician, machinist, structural ironworker, etc.) can do by eyeball ("Yup, that'll hold") most of the work of an engineer.
When surrounded by good people, the work of the engineer is to optimize and certify the design through careful mathematical analysis. And a good engineer will bridge the gap between white-collar management types and the blue-collar guys who actually build the company's products.
Also the fact that a lot of ships have 400hz running around (think large grey ships)
Heh... Yeah. Just think of the savings we'd have if the line frequency was higher... smaller transformers, for one.
Personally, would love to see an AC frequency at 880Hz. The harmonics would be musical notes so they'd be less intrusive when they get into audio systems.
Of course, phase control at power plants would become that much more of a challenge due to the greater frequency...
Slashdot Mirror
What does this mean for Windex?
Windex is the best way that I know to clean off windows!
It means they should offer Lindows to use their name! Create brand awareness for their fine glass cleaners among the computer geek community!
It's a perfect, untapped market - think of all those grimy chocolate fingerprints on your monitor!
"Bill Gates is a Jerk"
I like that one especially; it really gets to the heart of the matter.
I can just see the advertising copy:
Wal*Mart's own Budget PCs! Now with 500MHz Celeron processors, 16 megs of RAM, 2.1 gigs of hard disk space. Bill Gates is a Jerk 1.2 comes preinstalled.
In other news, Ford has recently demanded that Microsoft stop using the name "Explorer", as in Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer. Ford cites the 1990 introduction of the Explorer as evidence that they had the name first.
The many reliability and safety problems with Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer cause confusion among Ford Explorer customers who are themselves accustomed to these traits, a Ford spokesman said Friday.
FUCK YOU! The Tragically Hip are a great band. And Canadian music is better than American music. Just have a listen to latest Matthew Good CD, it is much better than anything on your top 40 list.
*MY* Top-40 list? Well, for one thing, I am Canadian. And *my* Top-40 list is reads along the lines of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, CCR, Dire Straits, ZZ Top, etc. You might or might not get the picture by now.
To illustrate the folly of your argument that Canadian music is great, I submit to you the very thing you're arguing as proof of the abomination of radio stations "forcing" American music on us:
The reason for content laws is because American music music (Which is complete SHIT) is forced down on us. Even With these laws, the radio stations manage to force the American popculture down on us. This is an abomination. The real artist get little attention will while your fucking britteny beers is played over and over again. If anything, we should ban American music.All righty, then.
Fact 1: Radio stations make money by selling advertising time.
Fact 2: Advertisers pay more money to run their ads when more people listen to a given radio station.
Fact 3: Increasing a radio station's listenership increases their profits.
Fact 4: To increase the listenership, the radio station has to play what people want to hear.
Summary of Facts 1-4: The radio station will make more money if it plays what people want to hear.
Therefore, if Canadian music is so great, listeners would want to hear it, and radio stations would play it on their own. No Canadian content laws would be required.
The fact that most radio stations play *exactly* their Canadian content requirements, many of them filling their 40% requirement during non-peak hours and playing their good stuff at drivetime (peak hours), should serve to illustrate the fact that Canadians don't especially care for Canadian music.
The one notable exception to this - the one national broadcaster who actually exceeds (massively or otherwise) the Canadian content requirements is the CBC. Nicknamed "The Corpse" in the broadcasting business, their ratings are tiny and their demographics are primarily shut-ins, 74-year-old women who would change the station but lost the owner's manual for the new-fangled radio they bought in the 1970s, and the 0.5% of 1% who actually think that Jean Poutine had been doing a good job as Prime Minister.
The fact that the average American can't appreciate music that is a little bit more sophisticated is another matter.A recent Arbitron (radio station ratings) study in Toronto showed something very interesting.
First, prime time in radio is drive time. Morning and evening commutes. People listen to the radio in their cars.
Second, superheterodyne radio receivers (which is just about every radio receiver made since the 1930s) leaks an RF signal mathematically related to the station to which the radio is tuned.
Radio station ratings services like Arbitron use the above facts to calculate drivetime ratings for a given radio station very easily. Point some special equipment at a freeway, count the number of car radios leaking a local oscillator signal which would indicate the radio is tuned to that station, and compare that to the total number of cars going by tuned to other stations.
Arbitron found that, on one day in Toronto, close to 50% of radios were tuned to Buffalo NY radio stations. Granted, of course, Arbitron studies presuppose that your station's listeners will be employed (which is good, because you don't care to try to advertise to people who have no money) and who drive (again, good, because few reasonable people will take the bus to work if they don't have to).
Apparently, even in Canada's biggest market, Canadians aren't any more sophisticated than Americans.
The whole thing broke down because the American side wasn't doing a roughly equivalent collection that Canadian artists could share in.
Canadian music released in the USA is done so by the RIAA and royalties are covered by ?ASCAP?. Therefore, an American levy would compensate Canadian artists for music released to the American market. I do not believe that the converse is true; I think SOCAN only covers Canadian artists, not American artists releasing in Canada.
So, for Canadian-only music residing on American hard disk drives, we can make a couple of simple assumptions.
To use shared files on American broadband services as a barometer of the numbers, Royalties ($R) "owing" are proportional to number (n) of Rita McNeil albums available for download off RoadRunner, Adelphia, Comcast, etc. users.
Therefore, $R = mu * n, where mu is some constant of proportionality to be determined by bored politicians who could be solving the world's problems instead of pandering to a bunch of self important idiots who don't seem to understand that their music sucks.
Since n --> 0, $R --> 0.
See? The system is already in place!
Over here in Mexico there's a tax on CD's that goes to Music distributors to compensate for CD piracy.
Yeah, it's the same in Canada.
But the funny thing is that we're being forced to pay for piracy of music that no intelligent human being would tolerate in an elevator, let alone pay for.
The tax levied on Canadians goes exclusively to Canadian artists to pay for all the copies of Tragically Hip's Bobcaygeon and Rita McNeil's Now The Bells Ring allegedly floating around on Kazaa Lite.
Of course, that's bullshit; Canadians with MP3 collections have stashes of the stuff that gets little airplay here because of the 40% Canadian Content laws. And those Canadian artists who have actual talent have generally fled to greener pastures south of the border... think of Rush, Celine Dion, Barenaked Ladies.
If they really wanted to help out those being hurt by people with large MP3 collections, send the money south of the border! (But, of course, that will never happen. Some Liberal-appointed 85-year-old Supreme Court justice *knows* that good Canadian kids are only listening to all that top-flight good Canadian music that has to be forced onto listeners with Canadian Content laws!)
If it's anything like that in Mexico, you must be as frustrated as I am. I'm paying a tax - for music that I couldn't be paid to listen to - to burn Knoppix demo CDs for friends.
I'm *so* proud of the protectionist pandering-to-special-interest-groups stupidity of my country.
I read in another one of your postings that you work for a defense contractor. I did too, worked for Litton until we were bought out by Northrop-Grumman and let the layoffs fly... I've also been stuck arranging the amusements for the office Christmas party.
You got volunteered, huh? That sucks. Listen, this might sound like an easy/stupid job but you'd better put at least a little thought into making sure you don't screw up. I like to think I'm a fun-lovin' and sometime outrageous guy but I hold myself in check at office parties. You never know when you're going to do something that will give your co-workers a bad impression of you that will last for years.
Completely! You have to be very careful at the office Christmas party. It's one thing if you're just a party-goer; you can hang around with your friends, but be careful to mingle. On the other hand, if you're arranging the entertainment, you have to mingle to make sure everyone is having a good time. And you have to be the life of the party, but still maintain dignity and respect. Avoid the alcohol.
You haven't told us anything about the type of people who are working at this company except that it's a mix of geeks and non-geeks. If I were you, I'd play it safe and try to find out what games were played at previous holiday parties. Whatever you do make the games very non-threatening. No Twister or crap like that. Even if you think your co-workers would be cool with that, you never know when one of the prudish spouses of an employee will object and sour the party (or cause the couple to get into an arguement).
Twister has to be just about the most sexually-charged game on the face of the earth.
What I did for the office Christmas party:
That has to be the longest off-topic non-troll post I've ever seen on
Heheh... Yeah. I know. I had to be creative for work today, so I didn't take my Ritalin.
(If anyone *ever* questions the reality of ADD, I submit my posting as evidence.)
You, sir could give my rambling 80-year-old professor a run for his money. Well done.Yeah, the rambling is good sometimes, though.
Yeah, but need more socks and jeans, too. Boxer shorts not so critical - going commando in a pair of line-dried jeans feels *so* good.
Don't fall for this! I now can't do all of my laundry, because I have no place to store my last dozen t-shirts. They are sitting on a chair right now. I started buying more clothes without looking at the volume of my dirty laundry. Now where do I store this stuff? Anyone want a t-shirt?Sure! You can send me your cool t-shirt donations. I like to work on cars, so I go through t-shirts, but I would especially like offensive, amusing, or technology t-shirts. (My favorites? "Fellatio is not an opera.", saw it when I was walking past a store in Toronto's gay village and decided that I had to have it. Also have a black Maytag golf shirt which I love.)
Why do I like the Maytag shirt so much? Well, years ago, I had a GE washing machine (it was a Hotpoint brand, GE made washers for dozens of other companies). The design of this washing machine was stupid - the tub is stationary, and in an unbalanced spin, the basket moves relative to the tub. At the bottom of the tub, there was a massive rubber seal between the tub and the top of the transmission. And that rubber seal was strangely dissolving into the wash water.
So, about 10 years ago, I scored a 1954 Maytag washer out of the garbage. Took a look and discovered that it needed belts. (Maytag washers *must* use Maytag belts; they did away with a complicated and unreliable clutch mechanism by simply designing the belt to slip as the washer comes up to speed in the spin cycle. Regular belts don't slip enough, so the washer will make nasty noises and might burn out its motor.) Spend $20 on a set of Maytag belts, and the thing has been running perfectly ever since. Washing dirty underwear for 49 years now with nothing more than two new belts - love it. No stupid rubber tub seal to dissolve and stain your clothes, no tub-basket contact in an unbalanced load to chip the basket and make it abrasive to clothing. Bulletproof design, almost all Maytags from 1940s to modern coin-op laundromat washers use this same mechanism. My clothes last almost forever, and I've grown so fond of my 1954 Maytag washer that I actually look forward to doing laundry.
In 2000, my 1967 Maytag dryer (also scored at about the same time, every bit as tough as the washer) got choked up with lint when the vent hose fell off the back. I pulled it apart to clean it and decided to change the felt drum seals at the same time. When I was at the appliance store buying the seals, I was chatting with the counter guy, and he asked me about my washer. He called over the sales manager and they asked me if they could borrow my washing machine to put in the showroom for the holiday rush ("Maytag Dependability" was the sign over my washer). I agreed, and they sent over a truck with a brand-new Maytag Neptune for me to use while mine was on display. And a Maytag golf shirt.
Anyway, to organize my clothes, I bought a $15 wooden shelving unit. I simply fold them and place them on that - for some reason, I don't use drawers. This has been a cheap and easy solution, reducing the former problem of a chair buried in cotton.
They still use blackboards? Here in NL, Canada they are considers a health hazord and have been replaced by white boards in all the schools and collages.
This is in Ottawa, Canada, at Carleton University. Yup, still using blackboards, installed last year in the brand-new Azrieli Theater.
I don't think the fumes from some of the cleaners and markers are much better for you than chauk dust.I would think so. It's probably some idiot with an arts degree who read in The National Enquirer that chalk dust might cause coughing, so without considering the whole system implications (ie. whiteboard chemicals), petitioned the school for the health effects. Universities are more apt to be "politically correct" and "environmentally correct" than rational, so they probably caved.
Personally, I would have sat the complainant down in my office, where there would be a chalk board, a white board, and a video projector.
I would invite the complainant to sniff the chalk dust, then the whiteboard markers and cleaners, then lick the lead solder on one of the video projector's PC boards. Before the Pb2+ ions could reach the complainant's intercranial fluids, I would then ask the complainant which one he or she now felt was more environmentally friendly and less apt to cause health problems.
If the complainant continued to prefer that blackboards were removed, then I would have the complainant removed from the campus for "lacking the basic common sense and reasoning abilities which we must expect of university students". At the very least, I would provide the complainant with a DeVilbiss respirator with dust cartridges, and one of those old Radio Shack toy firefighters helmets with the revolving light, both of which said complainant was going to wear as a condition of his or her presence on campus. (After all, we have to simultaneously protect this student from accidentally banging his or her cranium on things, and alert faculty and fellow students that this individual is delicate.)
Hopefully they will all be replaced by LCD projectors and the instructors will make all the notes aviable on the lan.No. For many parts of the lecture, yes, this would be a good thing. But there are lots of cases where the chalkboard is useful - in particular, answering a student's question by working out the problem on the board. The actual act of writing notes on the blackboard also forces the instructor to interact with the material. In my university experience, many PhDs really shouldn't have been teaching at all (a gifted researcher, for example, isn't necessarily an even reasonable teacher), and the best instructors were those who didn't have the "Doctor" title. Actually interacting with the material at a blackboard might be helping a PhD who hasn't solved a differential equation in 20 years remember how to do it so he can properly answer a question. I think the potential for embarrassment would also make them spend time reviewing the material before presenting it to the class.
I will use my psychic mind reading powers to say that you must be atleast 35.
Heheh... Nope, but I'm old beyond my years.
How come every generation of old people feels the need to criticize every new technology that comes around by mis-characterizing it?Actually, I love technology; my career choices undoubtedly reflect that.
If you put yourself in a situation where you're "on an electronic leash", then that's your fault. Do you realize that you don't have to answer a cell phone whenever it rings? It's pretty nifty technology, you have to press a button to answer it.I know. But the reality is that when the phone rings, you feel obliged to answer it. Then, pretty soon, it's a nuisance and makes you feel guilty.
Of course, you can turn off the ringer. Then, the problem becomes, "Huh-NEEEEEEE... Why didn't you answer the phone when I called? What were you doing?"
People become accustomed to being able to reach you and talk to you about every stupid little thing that happens in their lives.
For the very same reason I eschew land-line telephones or ICQ and other messaging systems, and like e-mail: It's a constant interruption. With e-mail, on the other hand, the sender can send the message when it's convenient for them. I can then read it and reply when it's convenient for me. Telephones, in particular cellphones, require it to be convenient for both parties to talk at the same time.
If you say that the advantages of having a cell phone aren't worth it for you, that's fine. But the only real disadvantage is how much it costs and having to carry it in your pocket. The whole leash thing simply tells me something about your relationship with the would-be leash-holder.Okay. Try this. Turn off your cellphone for a week. Tell me what you get from your friends. "I tried to call you, but you didn't answer." Endlessly. You've built up the expectation that you will be available to discuss all sorts of stupid things, including the weather, any time they're feeling bored in the lineup at the grocery store.
My friends know how I feel about cellphones, and telephones in general. We communicate by e-mail. We arrange to get together to drink beer by e-mail.
I imagine some older folks didn't like the telephone when it came out - I refuse to be on a leash when I'm at home, forced to be accountable to someone - somewhere.For sure. But there's still the escape with a regular telephone. If you don't answer your land line, they assume that you're out. If you don't answer your cellphone - which, by tradition, is always with you - then they assume that you're ignoring them.
Get there and this thing is a beast. The printer frame was cast aluminum about the same size and strength as the intake manifold and heads on a Chevy V8 engine. The computer itself was made of 1" steel square tubing that was like a quarter inch thick, the bolts that held it together looked like something you would use on a house. The hard drive was a single platter, and the base housing was cast bronze or something, weighed about 20 - 25 lbs or so, about the size of a current ATX desktop case, and the motor for the drive was a monster 220V electric motor about the size of a small pumpkin - half horsepower maybe?
It's really a shame that you had to trash that machine, it sounds really nice.
Texas Instruments used to build computers like that, even for domestic use. Remember the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A? The $99 console that you could buy a K-Mart? They were built like tanks, too.
Most impressive was the TI-99/4A PES (Peripheral Expansion System). It was a big steel box housing a power supply, a backplane, and a Shugart 5.25" single-side single-density disk drive - 90K per floppy!
TI made a fundamental mistake in their assumptions about computer-buying consumers. They assumed that consumers were idiots who weren't interested in doing more than playing games, writing BASIC programs, and balancing the checkbook. Consequently, TI didn't release the Assembly programming kit ("Editor/Assembler") until almost too late, and tried to keep all the details of the very weird, very minicomputerish hardware secret.
Part of the assumption was that, if Joe Consumer installs hardware, he's going to do it wrong. So they made it impossible to install the hardware wrong. All the accessory cards for the PES included on-board ROM chips with drivers; the machine had true plug-and-play capabilities. And because Joe Consumer is apt to try to put a square peg into a round hole, they made it impossible to install the cards incorrectly without using power tools.
How? They housed all the cards in cast aluminum cases.
So he started to bring a digital camera and a small tripod to class, and takes pictures of each blackboard full of material.
Oh, I just found another sample. Ugh... more sequences and series; I hated that stuff.
What? Wouldn't blocking the cell phone signal only prevent the person from sending the picture off? The photograph could still be taken and simply sent later, once the cell phone is away from the jamming signal, right?
This is true. But I don't think that's the primary application of cellphone jammers.
Yeah, well, Beethoven's Fifth, being played through a crappy 2" piezoelectric disk speaker as the ringtone on some Nokia in a movie theater. That's the best reason for jamming that I can come up with. (Why custom ring tones? Don't people know those things sound as stupid as coffee can mufflers on Honda Civics?)
I have had cellphones with work, and was glad to get rid of them when I did. I have no interest in being on an electronic leash, forced to be accountable to someone - somewhere. Or standing in the line-up at Wal*Mart, the ring and promptly following, "Hey, it's me. Whatcha doing? Wanna come over?" (Who is "me"? If I slept with this person, it must not have been very memorable.)
In short, I *hate* cellphones.
Quoting from article: including universities which use the technology to stop students from diddling away on phones during lectures.
Hey, if the student diddles quietly, it's his funeral when his GPA drops and he gets kicked out of school.
Cellphones with integrated digital cameras might have their place, though. I know a university student whose math professor puts excellent and comprehensive notes on the blackboard. So he started to bring a digital camera and a small tripod to class, and takes pictures of each blackboard full of material. He sent me a sample a while ago. An integrated camera/phone would never run out of available internal memory. Personally, copying the notes down would help me remember the material, but whatever works for him... there's a certain style of practical problem solving skill at work there: he's a second-year engineering student; I think I'll have to hire him when he's done. :)
However (and maybe this is because the Vorbis files emphasize the high frequencies; I'm not sure) the MP3s sound "flat", somehow.
My understanding of the sound quality difference between MP3 and Ogg Vorbis is that MP3 uses a full Fourier transform (sine, cosine and constant) on the audio, while Ogg Vorbis uses wavelets and does a cosine transform only.
Discontinuities between blocks sent to the sine transform would cause the Gibbs effect; these would be heard as a garbled low-amplitude reverberation of the high frequency components and transients in the audio. This is consistent with the effects of low bitrate compression; at higher bitrates, there would presumably be more terms used in both the sine and cosine transforms, so the amplitude of the compression artifacts would become smaller and therefore inaudible.
Cosine transforms, on the other hand, don't have problems with discontinuities, so there'd be an immediate increase in sound quality, at a given bitrate. Transients (attack on cymbals or the rattle of the chain across the membrane of a snare drum, for example) would be handled by wavelet functions - there's probably some sort of mechanism in the code which sees the sharp attack or decay as fast risetimes or falltimes, ignores processing it by cosine transform, and uses wavelets instead.
But I don't know for sure. For one thing, I am *not* a programmer. I can make "Hello, World" and compile my own kernel, but you really don't want me poring over the source for libvorbis.
First, the sample encoder is MUCH easier to use than what I've already been using (GRip). I don't know if that's because my current method is so terrible or because the new one is so great.
I like to use crip to make backups of my CDs to Ogg Vorbis. (Backup isn't really the term, it's just so much easier to play my CDs when I don't have to physically put them into the drive!)
crip has minimal dependencies, and runs quite happily on a machine without X.
Second, the resulting files were about 10% smaller.For a given sound quality, yeah. A -q 4 Vorbis file is about comparable to a 128kbps MP3 in size, but absolutely better in sound quality. After 192kbps in MP3, I can't reliably tell it from a CD. My compromise is to use -q 5, which yields the same filesize as a 160kbps MP3, which I cannot tell from a CD.
Third, the sound quality was "equivalent". That is, I couldn't tell the difference, BUT I'm not an expert and my sound equipment is FAR from top of the line (just some computer speakers plugged into an AWE32).I'm a former professional sound tech. I use a Sound A-5000 amplifier and a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4x speakers plugged into a modified (new op-amps, loads of shielding, separate linear DC supply to the analog stages) ISA SoundBlaster 16. I cannot tell an Ogg Vorbis file at -q 5 apart from the original (CD-quality) WAV file, or from a good ($900 when new) NAD CD player connected to my sound system.
Be careful compiling the Ogg encoder - specifically libvorbis - on older distros with the flaky Red Hat compiler. You'll get nasty artifacts in your audio.
Well, desktop, actually. As for murderer, the culprit would be the HP-35, not my T.I. SR-40. T.I. wishes they were the first.
I know, I know. I wasn't being brand-specific. Pickett was still in business until at least 2000 (selling drafting rulers, etc.). And it wasn't the TI which killed the sliderule, just the scientific calculator in general.
I need to get a battery and chager for my 35 one of these days.Good luck. I've never had an HP-35; if the battery is pretty easy (in shape and voltage), then you should be able to build a charger for it pretty easily. But, if I were you, I'd be looking for the original, for the same reason that I just spent $300 putting new bearings, gaskets and belts into my 1954 Maytag washing machine (well, not just that it's pretty, but I don't think $300 - or even $1000 - would buy me a new washer that would clean my dirty underwear for 49 years and need nothing more than 2 belts).
I also do need to get a better slide rule. The Pickett is just fine, but after all, it IS just a Microline.The official slide rule of the Apollo Space Program was the Pickett N600-MES, which were standard equipment on all Apollo missions. Yup, a Microline has been on the moon. Several of 'em, presumably one for each lunar landing.
Big sliderules aren't necessarily such a great thing, for the same reason as I'm not a big fan of calculators or CAD: Fewer significant figures forces you to round up or down during calculations - up on forces, down on material strength. It's interesting how Maytag stopped building washers like mine when CAD and the computer-driven practicality of finite element analysis allowed them to optimize the design to within an inch of its life.
Thanks for the tip about LyME! That's a new one to me.My pleasure! Glad to help.
I was at a local dinner with my vegiterian girl friend at the time and I ended up ordering a hamburger while she got a grilled cheese sandwich. I then had to sit through a 10 minute lecture on how meat is processed and killed and that I was a horrible person for eating meat.
That reminds me of the Family Guy episode where the Grim Reaper went out for coffee with the girl from the pet shop and ended up listening to her:
"You know why I like animals? They don't have wars. War is a human invention."
"What are you talking about? Animals fight all the time!"
"Not with nuclear arms! You can't hug your children with nuclear arms!"
Solves the problem, then turns to waitress: "Check, please!"
I hope, at the very least, you dumped her after that clear display that your offspring wouldn't benefit intellectually from having their mother's defective genes.
I said: "You will put out meat pizzas, right? I am a carnivore and I believe it is unethical to kill and eat defenseless little plants which are rooted in the ground and are unable to put up any fight at all against human harvestors. Animals at least have a chance to escape or mount a defense."
That was beautiful!
There's a recent school of thought that some plants emit chemicals when injured; these chemicals serve as signals to other plants. I think it was a species of evergreen - pine or something. If the plant senses injury, isn't that pain?
One way or another, it sucks being a part of the food chain. However, it's stupid to pretend that we're not omnivorous - there's a reason we have incisors! So I like to fsck with them.
I still have my PETA t-shirt from school days. "PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals". Used to have the pop-culturally correct vegan types screaming and yelling at me in the hallways, calling me a murderer.
but without scripts and a mathematics keypad, it is nothing compared to my 83+, let alone my 89.
Another reply to your post mentioned it; I'll add my two cents: I run LyME on my Palm IIIxe.
I love it. For most stuff, it's perfectly adequate, and it's really great having much of Matlab in your back pocket with everything else that a well-used PDA carries.
I use my little old Palm for everything. Replying to e-mail (Eudora for Palm) on the PDA during downtime somewhere requires a keyboard. As such, I have it available for LyME, and generally whip it out anywhere I need more computing power than my Casio FX-991MS or TI-30XIIB. (Tangent: The Casio has *much* more features than the TI, but the TI feels more like the engineers who designed it actually use it.)
Anyway, there are two flaws I've found with LyME in my daily use, and I'm picky. Big calculations will appear to crash the Palm, but control is eventually returned (unless your function or script is faulty). More pressingly, however, I'm probably missing how to put axis on plots. axis doesn't appear to do it, and it's really hard to look at a graph where the x and y values aren't labelled!
Sometimes it feels slow. But that's the trade-off I make for having an old Palm - long battery life, and I'm not out $300+ if something happens to it.
Otherwise, I love it. Vectorizing data and using your own functions against it makes data entry dead easy in the field even using Graffiti; I can be done a calculation while someone else is still digging a notebook computer out of a briefcase.
either my Pickett Microline 120 or my TI SR-40.
Ah, the murderer and its victim, reunited in your desk drawer.
I do my handheld crunching with an assortment:
It's called The Library. Not only are there desks there, but you don't have to block out the ambient noise of three idling computers in an enclosed concrete 10' by 8' space.
Meant to do this for a while, but never got around to it.
I have a great old 1950s Quik-Frez fridge which I updated a long time ago with a new (R-134) Amana compressor, new insulation, homebuilt electronic thermostat, little bit of Bondo to fill the dents, and a fresh coat of paint. Looks brand new, works even better.
The problem is, as much as I love it, I can never get around to defrosting it (no way to easily add defrost heaters to the ice box). And it's a little small for food and stuff.
The sound of my computers drives me insane, but I'm not going to go to the silent PC trouble, or water cooling, etc. So what I've been meaning to do is put a small hole for wires in the bottom of the fridge and install the computers inside it. With the door closed, it would be silent (I stuck a power supply connected to a pair of old Seagate ST-225 5.25" hard disks inside to try). The thermostat could be set to keep the interior about 50F, or turned off altogether if the interior temperature doesn't get out of hand.
The only real problem is the accessibilty of the backs of the machines for cables and stuff.
It's not an issue right now, though. Most of my computers now live in a laundry/furnace room on the other side of a wall from my monitor and keyboard, so hopefully this will give someone an idea of what to do with a cool old fridge.
My father, an electrical engineer, was surprised when I showed him my electrician's reference book containing formulas for things like load balancing. He thought, for big jobs, electricians worked off pre-made plans drawn up by someone "educated" who did the calculations for them.
Heheh... must have blown him away to learn that you can do almost all AC circuit analysis without having to take the square root of a negative number even once... and still have the circuit work!
I imagine many PhDs think carpenters don't know anything about structural engineering, or that auto mechanics are totally ignorant of mechanical engineering. Ivory-tower arrogance can sometimes work just like thick-headed stupidity.I agree completely. Some of the engineers I've worked with have had the same mentality. One in particular, a very recent top-of-his-class graduate from a respectable mechanical engineering school, had a particular need to try to spoon-feed a machine shop full of guys who'd already had a decade of experience before he was born.
While the guy I'm thinking about is a particularly stellar example, to a lesser extent, I know lots of people from university whose career choices were made because, "Well, the guidance counsellor said that I was good at math and physics, so I should do engineering".
These are people who never played with Lego, and didn't ask for tools for Chrismakkah. To me, that's a more important engineering prerequisite than calculus, since calculus can be learned; mechanical/electrical/etc aptitude simply cannot.
Engineering is a tough course. I know first-hand. But it doesn't make you more intelligent, or more creative - education cannot do that (if anything, education seems to stifle creativity - look at PhDs). All it does is teach you a lot of stuff, show you a new way of thinking about problems, and work you nearly to death.
Lots of the smartest guys I've known are the blue-collar guys who build, install and service the stuff I design. We hang around together, drinking beer, shooting the shit, and working on each others' vehicles. I like hanging around on the floor, working alongside them, learning from their experience, and I like when they hang around in my office, looking over my shoulder and trying to understand a pile of math or seeing OrCAD on my monitor. The janitor hated all the oily bootprints on my carpet, so I picked up a runner.
I expect them to tell me when they think a design or procedure can be improved. They help me make a product more reliable, more durable, cheaper to assemble or easier to fix.
For the most part, a good (wo)man with relevent skills (electrician or technician, machinist, structural ironworker, etc.) can do by eyeball ("Yup, that'll hold") most of the work of an engineer.
When surrounded by good people, the work of the engineer is to optimize and certify the design through careful mathematical analysis. And a good engineer will bridge the gap between white-collar management types and the blue-collar guys who actually build the company's products.
Found it! A great little program which will report the status of pins on serial ports. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/86 223
Also the fact that a lot of ships have 400hz running around (think large grey ships)
Heh... Yeah. Just think of the savings we'd have if the line frequency was higher... smaller transformers, for one.
Personally, would love to see an AC frequency at 880Hz. The harmonics would be musical notes so they'd be less intrusive when they get into audio systems.
Of course, phase control at power plants would become that much more of a challenge due to the greater frequency...